From John Gruber at Daring Fireball last Friday, this is the story of James Thomson and his Mac and iOS app PCalc. James was one of the creators of The Dock in the original Mac OS X, as it was designed under Avie Tevanian, the man brought from NeXT by Steve Jobs to create a new operating system for the Macintosh, when Jobs returned to Apple to save it from certain doom as an independent company.
The rest, as they say, is now history...
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PCalc, An Origin Story
This is an updated version of a piece I wrote for the 20th anniversary, with an extra ten years of history!
Many people using PCalc on their shiny devices today don't realise that the app has been around for a lot longer than they think. In some cases, a lot longer than they've been thinking.
pcalc.com
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ZDN's Take: James' app for OS X called DragThing was indispensable as a Dock replacement to me on OS X once I bought a Power Mac G4 MDD ('Mirrored Drive Door') tower model to run it, when it could run older MacOS 8/9 apps reliably well under OS X's Classic Environment.
I paid for PCalc on iOS as a way to thank James for making DragThing and keeping it maintained and running for so many years on the website he created for it. You can read my posts here on SI in this thread about it, starting here. Posts before 2010 can be searched individually with the term "dragthing" (without quotes) for the same.
I recommend saving James' article offline and reading his blog. He's a very nice guy, I corresponded with him via email about DragThing when it was no longer being actively developed and was not updated to a 64-bit application, so it could continue to run on macOS as required by Apple. |
